In his recent paper ‘Analyticity: An Unfinished Business in
Possible-World Semantics’ (Rabinowicz 2006), Wlodek Rabinowicz takes on
the task of providing a satisfactory definition of analyticity in the framework
of possible-worlds semantics. As usual, what Wlodek proposes is technically
well-motivated and very elegant. Moreover, his proposal does deliver an interesting
analytic/synthetic distinction when applied to sentences with natural kind
terms. However, the longer we thought and talked about it, the more questions
we had, questions of both philosophical and technical nature. Hence the idea
of this little paper – for how better to honor a philosopher than by trying very
hard to criticize him? After quickly running over some background in possible
worlds semantics and setting out Wlodek's proposal against that background,
we shall bring up and discuss our questions in sections 3 – 5. In the final section,
we shall also make a stab at a different solution to the problem, making
use of our own earlier idea of relational modality.